You are here

Laurence (Lorette) Nobécourt

Biography

Lorette Nobécourt (photo by permission of S. Nobécourt)

Lorette Nobécourt was born in 1968 in Paris. She was educated in an Ursuline convent and, before turning to writing, studied theatre, business and journalism. In 1994 Nobécourt’s first novel La Démangeaison was published by Sortilèges. The central character is a young woman who has suffered with psoriasis since early infancy. Her narration of the transformations and eruptions that the disease causes resonates with society’s rejection of others whose lives and bodies seem strange and without clear boundaries. The narrator says of herself ‘Folle, lépreuse, suicidaire, ainsi fut mon rôle, oui, mais je restais donc étrangère’. The disease, while being an individual affliction, also comes to symbolize the making visible of hidden hatreds and hypocrisies in groups related to the narrator, including her family and the wider society. Its onset is presented as ‘[l]a haine à fleur de peau, dénoncée par mon corps’, and a cypher of the relationships of family members who ‘s’accrochaient les uns aux autres, se haïssaient, se dévoraient’. She also declares ‘Ma peau avait éclaté comme le monde que l’on m’a transmis’.

In Nobécourt’s novels, this world is depicted as systematically oppressive to those who are different, as demonstrated most horrifically in Auschwitz and its subsequent forgetting, a theme explored in greater length in Horsita (1999). Her texts lay bare the ways in which unacceptable bodies are removed from society, to hospitals or ultimately to death camps. Nevertheless the narrator of La Démangeaison ultimately attempts liberation from the isolation of illness and difference through acceptance and delight in her body’s leaky boundaries, and through sexual excess with her young lover Rodolphe of whom she says, ‘il pénétra ma peau et mon sexe ensemble’. This and other attempts in La Démangeaison and La Conversation (1998) to ‘parler chair’ have led Nathalie Morello in her article ‘La Démangeaison et La Conversation de Lorette Nobécourt : Quand ‘le parler chair’ devient révolte… féministe?’ (Romance Studies, 20,1, June 2002) to raise and address the question of whether Nobécourt’s texts deploy feminist strategies similar to those advocated by Hélène Cixous and Annie Leclerc. Morello states ‘l’exploration du potential subversif de la sexualité et du corps féminins, le refus de l’ordre au profit du désordre, semblent encourager une lecture féministe’. Yet she also ultimately asserts that the texts encourage neither a feminist nor anti-feminist reading but present narrators constantly reflecting on ‘la nécessité de constamment repenser leur stratégie de résistance afin de déjouer les forces oppressives d’un système caractérisé par une puissance d’adaptation face aux évolutions sociales qui est tout aussi surprenante que pernicieuse’.

In Nobécourt’s works, individual histories as well as collective History are inscribed on the flesh itself – described in L’Equarrissage as ‘la peau sanglante de la mémoire’ – in a space where ‘la mémoire rabotée jusqu’à l’os’ (La Conversation) attempts to reveal and write itself. References to Nobécourt’s own life and the many textual echoes in her texts create a strong unity in her work, defined by a journey through body and mind. The inside of the body is sought after and ends in the revelation of splendour – going through disgust and the abject – that of the nudity of the body finally exposed. Nobécourt thus attempts to reinscribe the body to counter the disappearance of the human being as a subject, in a world where, as Irène describes it in La Conversation, ‘la négation de l’individu s’achève par la négation de son corps’. This goes as far as the creation of a mythical space in Substance (2001).

En nous la vie des morts, published in 2006, is a text that clearly marks a change in style, though still dealing with issues of life and death. Similarly to its central character, Nortatem, who leaves New York to go and live alone in the Vermont after his best friend commits suicide, Nobécourt also experienced solitude, leaving Paris for a year-long stay at the Villa Medici, before going to the Himalayas. This life experience entailed a renewal of her writing in En nous la vie des morts, as a new start in the exploration of the self, memory, life and death, revealing an inner journey. Nortatem’s interior quest leads to a new state of consciousness and appeasement, under the sign of mutation.

In 2016 Nobécourt published a new text, entitled Lorette, but under a different pen name: that of Laurence Nobécourt. This change in name is at the heart of Lorette, in which Nobécourt announces her decision to revert to what is actually her birth name, ‘Laurence’, as opposed to the one she has been using for the last 25 years, ‘Lorette’, both in her personal and public life, and under which she published all of her works up until now. She explains how the name ‘Lorette’ acted as a means of survival, as a protective shell for ‘Laurence’, but how it also hindered her self. Asserting her original name, Lorette is a reflection on her past, a declaration of a second, liberating birth. It reads like a new milestone in Nobécourt spiritual quest towards life itself.

—: ‘Figuring Out the Family: Family as Everyday Practice in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’ in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory ed. by Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2007, pp.39-58)